I'm not arguing that increasing green energy production like wind and solar should stop. Because climate change is arguably a larger existential threat to the planet. But we do need to do a better job planning where infrastructure lands so we can mitigate habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation doesn't really factor into the planning calculus at all.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallgrass_prairie#Remnants

2: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/111219-wi...

If we arent careful, we'll lose the shortgrass prairie to energy development just like we lost the tallgrass prairie to corn.

But what you lost in scale you gain in:

- Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation.

- Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

What are the "distribution costs"? Presumably any cost besides the cost of infrastructure to connect to the grid are negligible, and you have to pay the infrastructure cost anyway (or rather, if you pay to over provision on production and storage such that you can be truly off-grid, then you're going to be paying far more than the infrastructure costs).

> Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.

I doubt it. First of all, making plans based on some unknown innovation seems, uh, unwise to put it nicely. Secondly, it's very unlikely that such an innovation would reduce the cost of rooftop solar but not farmed solar. Thirdly, such an innovation seems very unlikely since we already have ubiquitous tasks that every home needs (electrical, plumbing, roofing, dry-wall) for which we still hire professionals--the ubiquity hasn't manifested an innovation that lowers the technical barrier enough that we all do these things ourselves.

Moreover, economies of scale work in the other direction. It's much cheaper to maintain a single 1MW solar farm than it is to maintain 50 20KW rooftop installations.

However, we don't need to speculate about tradeoffs. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., rooftop solar costs 2-3 times as much as farmed solar, so it seems the economies of scale dwarf any advantages rooftop solar might convey.

> Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.

If I'm understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany correctly, solar only accounts for 8.2% of German electrical capacity and of that 14% comes from rooftop solar. So something like 1% of Germany's capacity comes from rooftop solar?

Once the subsidies dried up, the snake oil salesmen came out. Timeshare hawkers are evil, but they have NOTHING on rooftop solar companies.

And in Nevada the regs changed and now people aren't getting paid for what they generate at anywhere near the same level which further levels the "value proposition".

Home solar was always propped up and if adoption has dropped off significantly in climates that are prime for it - it has zero chance elsewhere in the country.

Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.

If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and commercial office buildings (one large boiler providing hot water for all tenants).

> Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

The question isn't whether there's an issue hooking individual residential solar installations up to the grid--no one disputes that. The relevant question is how expensive is it to build and maintain tens of millions of individual rooftop solar installations versus several orders of magnitude fewer, larger installations. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., it would cost at least ~$2.8M to generate 1MW via rooftop solar systems while it would cost only about ~$1M to generate the same amount of energy via solar farm.

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.

>...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs,

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

>...and in the desert, right?

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_i_change...

(Update: Can't reply to the reply, but here's some actual scientists on Shellenbergers latest output https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/article-by-michael-sh... )

You probably think science can be settled too?

“Deserts are big” isn’t a compelling argument to me. Oceans are even bigger yet I’m still unhappy with how much pollution goes into them. The only thing deserts have for them is that it’s easy for humans to ignore them and it’s politically easier than “omg scary nucular” (ignoring the fact that coal plants, even so-called “clean coal” emit more radiation in one year than a nuclear plant does over its entire lifetime).

Think of it this way. We still have no data that indicates wind and/or solar can displace coal/gas as energy sources. They primarily displace about 10-20% of our energy mix that usually is other sources anyway (geothermal, hydro, natural gas, etc).

Germany, 2010:

    Coal+Oil+Gas      55%
    Nuclear           25%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  13%

    Coal+Oil+Gas      36%
    Nuclear           12%
    Wind+Solar+Hydro  41%

There was no way to 'fail' such efforts, because until last year, there was no actual roadmap for getting rid of coal.

Instead, there were CO2 reduction goals. We were going to miss the mark for 2020 (40% reduction compared to 1990), but thanks to Covid, we've actually met the target...

Germany: 57% from non-co2 sources France: 69% (50% from nuclear, 19% wind/solar/hydro)

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/germany.france/e...

That's still bad, no argument: France splits atoms, while Germany burns lignite, and peat aside, that's as bad as it gets as far as CO2 goes.

However, that's beside the point: The fact remains that Germany did move a significant amount of electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewables.

That is incorrect. You may be thinking of this Scientific American article:

"Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Which is a garbled retelling of this 1978 report:

"Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants"

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.abstrac...

The point of the 1978 report was that radioactive elements from coal are more likely to be concentrated in the food supply and retained in the body than radioactive elements released from power reactors. That leads to an effective higher radiation dose to people under their modeling assumptions. But nuclear reactors release more becquerels (or curies, to use the older unit) of radioactive material to the environment.

You can see this difference if you look at the original publication via sci-hub.

https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045

Table 2 shows an estimated airborne release of about 1.2 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe coal plant.

Table 3 shows shows an estimated airborne release in excess of 5000 curies per year of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe nuclear reactor.

But since the reactor radionuclides do not biologically concentrate in food or bones, they are dispersed throughout the environment and human exposure is small.

In table 5 you can see that the whole body population dose commitments for the different sources, in man-rem/year, are 18-23 for coal (depending on stack height) and 13 for a nuclear reactor. So coal is worse but far from 50x worse. Looking exclusively at bone exposure, coal can be an order of magnitude worse since radium released from coal behaves chemically like calcium and concentrates in bones.

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...

0: https://apnews.com/article/b8dd6050c702467e8be4b1272a3adc87

You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.

This is my first and only HN account, but I thank you for the warm welcome.

An eagle would need to be essentially already doomed in the wild or very young in a too obvious and accessible unguarded nest which could be threatened by say a squirrel nest raiding.